Hard disk drives (HDDs) are now being widely used as large-capacity recording apparatuses in a variety of applications, because of their low cost per bit, such as for video recorders, network-attached storage (NAS), file servers, etc. In the current information-oriented society where information items are generated every day, there has been an increasing demand for higher capacity and density HDDs for storing the information. As one of the techniques for enhancing the density of HDDs, there exists a technique called an inter-track interference (ITI) cancelling technique or a two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) technique. This technique utilizes not only reproduction signal from a target track, but also reproduction signal from a track adjacent to the target track so as to cancel track noise from the adjacent signal contained in the target track in order to enhance the decoding accuracy of the recording/reproducing signal from the target track.
In order to acquire reproduction signals from a plurality of tracks, a reproducing head having a plurality of reproducing elements has been proposed.
The structure of the reproducing head having a plurality of reproducing elements includes a pair of reproduction shields for each of the reproducing elements to isolate signal detection paths for guiding currents to the reproducing elements. In this structure, however, it is necessary to provide a sufficient distance, known as traveling-directional distance Gd, between the reproducing elements. If the traveling-directional distance Gd is long, a change in an inter-element distance Rp along the track width will increase even when the skew angle changes only slightly. As a result, the inter-track interference amount of a reproduction signal will significantly differ between different radial positions at which reproduction is performed.